The Cloud Wars: Why Nobody Can Catch Up With Amazon

H

HardOCP News

[H] News
Joined
Dec 31, 1969
Messages
0
I knew Amazon was ahead of Microsoft, Google and IBM, I just didn't know it was by this far.

The more customers a cloud platform gets, the more servers it can afford to add. The more servers they have, the better they can take advantage of economies of scale, and offer customers lower prices for more robust features with more enterprise appeal. The lower their prices and the better their products, the more customers they get, and the more new customers switch over the cloud. Amazon calls this the "virtuous cycle."
 
I am more surprised that IBM is number 3, and that Google is so little of the market.
 
All though still in infancy I wonder if Google for Work cloud solutions take grasp in any shape or form and then this chart blows up for Google? Just really surprised and how is this even measured I have to wonder?
 
Shmee said:
I am more surprised that IBM is number 3, and that Google is so little of the market.
Click to expand...

IBM's acquisition of Softlayer has helped that quite a bit, as Softlayer's network is still highly sought after by some people.
 
TheOneKnownAsMe said:
IBM's acquisition of Softlayer has helped that quite a bit, as Softlayer's network is still highly sought after by some people.
Click to expand...

If it's good enough for [H], it's good enough for me! (We use SL at work too, give me bare metal or give me death)
 
I didn't realize that Google had a commercial cloud-hosting option. That might be part of their problem.
 
toast0 said:
If it's good enough for [H], it's good enough for me! (We use SL at work too, give me bare metal or give me death)
Click to expand...

I used to be a dedicated server engineer, worked on deploying SL bare metal servers quite often. Pretty interesting system they have set-up, with quite a few locations.
 
I think a lot of it comes down to ease of use as well. With Amazon you can launch and configure a wide-array of servers within minutes. Back when I was looking into doing a project that needed that, Microsoft/Rackspace/Google all had significantly more hoops to jump through. May have changed now.

DigitalOcean was another one that was actually easier than Amazon.
 
I didn't realize Oracle had a cloud offering, either.

Our company has moved a bunch of stuff to the cloud. It does/doesn't surprise me that Amazon has such a huge presence. It doesn't surprise me just because Amazon is big and offers lots of pre-packaged services. It *does* surprise me because they (and Rackspace) are freakin' expensive compared to smaller alternatives like Linode.
 
TheOneKnownAsMe said:
I used to be a dedicated server engineer, worked on deploying SL bare metal servers quite often. Pretty interesting system they have set-up, with quite a few locations.
Click to expand...

Yeah, they've added a bunch more locations since the IBM acquisition too, including Brazil and India; I assume those are pretty similar, but we only have servers in their US datacenters currently.
 
AWS is definitely huge. You see a job of job listings asking for AWS experience now, and AWS certification seems to be one of the hot certs to have.
 
Reminds me of the polling numbers of the Republican candidates for US President 2016. ;)
 
We use Amazon for our stuff here at work. Have stuff spread across multiple regions, CDN, etc...
Several hundred servers, and I know ours is actually a "small" deployment.

That said, we're looking at making the move to Azure here soon. Been doing TONS of workshops, meetings with MS coming here, and us going to them to get this deal all done and the architecture designed. I'm not a fan though. So many things we do at Amazon we're told that isn't possible, or is an upcoming feature, etc...
 
With comcast data caps. You'd think more people would be moving away from cloud storage.
 
Galvin said:
With comcast data caps. You'd think more people would be moving away from cloud storage.
Click to expand...

This has nothing to do with the home consumer, end-user. This is enterprise level cloud compute.

AWS is definitely leaps and bounds w/o even remote comparison to Aazure, GCE, etc when it comes to their offerings. We are in the middle of a huge push over the next year to move 90% of our workload to AWS. Basically will be having us get rid of 3 datacenters, and only keep 1-2 racks in a single datacenter once we finish.
 
Some of the largest companies in the world use AWS and it is helping them close many datacenters.
 
They have done this for a long time too. I don't know if they still do it, but you used to be able to rent time slots for computing power to brute force and things of that nature.
 
zaniix said:
Some of the largest companies in the world use AWS and it is helping them close many datacenters.
Click to expand...

Heh, yea. I did a cloud network paper on Amazons services...I was surprised how much shit they have control of...even security wise.
 
Uvaman said:
That 'other' bar is pretty big.
Click to expand...

My employer is in the 'other' category. We have had our own datacenters that were located in our offices. Economies of scale have led to us phasing those out. So now we use third parties for datacenters such as these guys and these guys. We still provide the hardware in those arrangements and our employees have physical access to all of it. Mundane things like tape rotations are handled by smart hands, while we do hardware installations and upgrades ourselves.

We have a number of customers integrated into our cloud offerings in these datacenters that we rent rack space in, and as long as they are with us the plan is to continue that arrangement. Lately, however, the emphasis is on integrating clients into Azure and Softlayer. It has gotten to the point where it doesn't even make sense financially to use some of the third party datacenters for rented rack space. Keeping up with the Amazons and Microsofts to offer competitive performance is breaking the bank. I remain pretty skeptical that this model is viable, because our clients can get a cheaper rate by going directly to cloud provider, cutting us out of the picture.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top